…was one of those days.
Living on a corner has its moments: we face a cross street and there is a major city arterial running past our west side that never stops: it serves the Maple Street Bridge; and of bridges that cross the river, there is the Monroe Street, the Washington (you really can’t count the Lincoln, which carries little traffic) and that’s pretty well it for the downtown—so we get traffic, it’s a one-way street, and downhill, and people speed like fiends.

I was out feeding the fishes and noticed a very heavy engine parked near our fence, in the most-used lane. Fire truck. This deserved a look—and opening the gate showed not just the fire truck but a police b&w, an ambulance, a badly wrecked black car—front left turned to tinfoil—facing diagonally the wrong way on the one-way; another black car facing the opposite, correct-way diagonal—if he hadn’t been 10 feet off the road and up in a thick growth of juniper on the side of the house across the street. There was besides, a white car parked diagonally at the point of our corner, going the wrong lane onto our street, and two other cars stopped on our street going the right way. There were people all over talking to the officer in charge, while the monster fire engine and ambulance served as barriers. I don’t know if anybody was taken in the ambulance: the officer was talking to everybody, and did open the back door of the ambulance to talk to someone, but if it had been serious, I’m sure the ambulance would have moved on.
Anyway it was a warm day in the 80’s, and about 8 people were camped on a brick retaining wall waiting. A wrecker showed up to move the black car, there’d have to be another to fish the second car out of the bushes, and over all, it was a wild day on our street. Hard to figure who was at fault, but the energy that sent the car into the bushes was considerable: Jane thinks, and I concur, that that car was rear-ended, and that speed likely played a major part in it. A car trying to pull out from our street’s stop sign is another possibility. The physics of it all posed quite a challenge.

Then half our kitchen floor samples arrived, and they’re exactly what both of us wanted. Grey mottling like weathered old limestone. And waterproof. The catch is—somebody didn’t pack the box right, somebody else dropped it, and every single piece has a corner too damaged to use. So that has to go back to Home Depot as unusable. But I think we do have our floor color and pattern. It’s really pretty and does not show the ‘repeats’ that can drive you visually crazy.

We got Jane’s car to the repair shop—it’s got some problem that’s not the battery. Won’t start. This means we have half the garage free to put junk in and we have called for a dumpster to be set in our drive so we can do a major house and yard cleanout. Yay! Jane found our city will rent you one and pick it up. And this is what, after a move inside OKC, then a move up here to one apartment, then to another apartment, then to this house—all inside eleven years—we desperately need.

The blood pressure is now in the normal zone on both numbers thanks to that new med. And I got to the eye doc to order a pair of distance glasses. I tried all the frilly pretty frames the assistant showed me, wanting larger lenses for general viewing, and all of them were a no-go down to ridiculous. I finally said, y’know, what I look best in is aviator glasses, never mind they’re always in the ‘men’s’ section. Put them on, and the assistant looked highly surprised, and said, “You’re right!” Yep. Those look right on my face. The Harry Potter look makes me look like an owl, the cat-eye makes me look like I need high heels, leopard tights, and a bun with a pencil stuck in it, and some of the others defy any description but awful. So aviators it is.

And out of the blue last evening, thunder, a lot of it, driving sideways rain (unusual in the PNW, where rain usually mists down over several days) and then the sky lit up vivid orange shading to pink. Sunsets are very unusual in the Inland Empire. But the lowering sunlight managed to push through those storm clouds in a way I’ve never seen in ten years up here. And ours are generally ‘sea’ clouds, filmy and silky and not the clumpy ridged sort you get from horizon to horizon in Oklahoma that make the sky look like a bed of coals. Ours looked on one horizon like a forest fire, intense orange, and overhead it was cotton candy pink billows. Really unusual. We don’t get the violent weather up here as a rule, so we don’t get the sunsets that go with them. But last night we did.